On the eve of the 77th trade show’s opening, Frankfurter Buchmesse stages its annual opening press conference.

By Porter Anderson, Editor-in-Chief | @Porter_Anderson

Haddada: ‘Fear Is the Little Brother of Cowardice’

While the big news from Frankfurter Buchmesse‘s 2025 news conference today (October 14) threatened to be that the newly minted Nobel laureate in literature, László Krasznahorkai, would not be on-hand to speak as expected, the trade show’s administration quickly moved past that disappointment.

Torsten Casimir, the fair’s communications and content chief, explained that Krasznahorkai was under the weather and unable to join in.

Wishing the Hungarian writer all the best, the news conference then moved smoothly to what would become a sequence of emphases on:

• Threats to copyrighted creativity;
• Struggles in the realm of the “trinity of freedoms,” as some call them (the freedoms to express oneself, to publish, and to read);
• Ways in which relationship and community can strengthen the industry and arts of publishing; and
• A “literary input” from the Berlin-based author Nora Haddada.

Schmidt-Friderichs: ‘AI Should Serve Humans, Not Vice-Versa’

As Publishing Perspectives readers know, Karin Schmidt-Friderichs—for six years the chair of the Börsenverein des Deutschen Buchhandels, parent company of Frankfurt B00k Fair—will be succeeded after two terms later this month by publisher Sebastian Guggolz in the role. Her commentary today thus will have been her last at a Frankfurt opening press conference.

A “few billionaires increasingly decide which algorithms present which kind of information” is offered to the reading public “without taking responsibility for the content they publish or withhold.”Karin Schmidt-Friderichs

Schmidt-Friderichs took the occasion to stress the importance of the fact that trade visitors, exhibitors, writers, readers, and others in the broadest view of the industry continue to come together, this time fop a 77th year.

“Why doesn’t my bot write what your bot thinks the KI-Assistant [AI program] just published?” she asked, telling members of the press that the professionals of the book industry must “not delegate thinking, but commit ourselves to a charter of dialectical thinking, a celebration of discourse and of being together as humans.”

Buchmesse’s shelves, she said, are filled not only with “books of the world” for entertainment and escapism but also with “story, appeals, manifestos, and discourses,” revealing “world views, utopias, and dystopias. Reading them shapes our perception of the world and desires we direct toward the world”—our attitudes.

The Buchmesse experience, Schmidt-Friderichs said, “gives me courage” because it’s aligned with the individual’s freedoms of expression” and the right to choose “diversity and serendipity,” as evidenced in the wares of 4,000 exhibitors from 130 countries on-site at Frankfurter Messe for the world’s largest book-publishing trade show of its kind.

Warning that “in the virtual world” and in “the guise of ‘progress,'”  a “few billionnaires increasingly decide which algorhithms present which kind of information” is offered to the reading public “without taking responsibility for the content they publish or withhold.”

While Germany continues to battle a problem of lagging youth literacy, she said, “we forget that AI should serve humans and not vice-versa.”

Boos: ‘In a Very Polarized Time’

Buchmesse president and CEO Juergen Boos, in taking the stage to speak to the press, echoed Schmidt-Friderichs in asking, “Why do we get more than 7,000 journalists” at Frankfurter Buchmesse each year, “why do we have more than 4,000 publishers, more than 200,000 visitors” at the show?

“Frankfurt Book Fair shows what literature can do. It connects people, it can tolerate contradictions, and it can reveal new perspectives.”Juergen Boos

“Because the Frankfurt Book Fair shows what literature can do. It connects people, it can tolerate contradictions, and it can reveal new perspectives.

“But we are opening this” Frankfurter Buchmesse “in a very polarized time,” he said, “a time when clear messages and commitments are required, when literature is under pressure because of wars, censorship, book bans, and counterculture.

“Even in Western democracies,” Boos said, “there are culture wars which have direct impact on publishing. Libraries remove whole genres from their shelves. Grants are being filtered politically, the freedom of science and publication comes under threat.

“And that’s why, together with our strong partners,” Boos said, “we have created our culture-policy program, Frankfurt calling, not because it’s nice, but because it’s necessary—because there must be places where authors are heard, authors who are otherwise silenced or banned.

“This is the focal point of voices who rarely share a stage. The Palestinian bookseller Mahmoud Muna talks about his region; we talk with the Nobel Peace Prize laureate Maria Ressa [and] the former NATO secretary-general Jens Stoltenberg.”

Frankfurt Calling. Boos said, ties the trade fair to such organizations as the United Nations, Amnesty International, and the International Publishers Association.

“But debates alone do not make a big book fair,” he said, adding that, “To make these voices resonate, Buchmesse is also required as a trading platform for the exchange of rights and licenses for translation work and editing. At many points, such rights-trading activities embrace the migration of content to television series, films, radio plays, and games. The program this year includes what is perhaps its most aggressive efforts yet in the ‘book-to-screen’ sector.

“We create platforms which make text into global contents, be it on paper or on screen or digitally. We also have artificial intelligence. What is the role of AI in translation? How does it change editing and rights management?

“This is exactly the kind of debates which make Frankfurt a place where the industry creates standards, and when we talk about the future of the industry, it also is good to look at new markets and literary voices.

“Our guest of honor, the Philippines, stands exactly for that, and it stands for the freedom of literature … More than 100 authors and artists have traveled here from the archipelago, including the author [and documentary filmmaker] Patricia Evangelista; the new-adult writer Mina Esguerra; and the Noble Peace Prize laureate Maria Ressa.

“The program,” Boos told journalists, “goes from climate fiction to diaspora literature and flip top rap battles, and it will be relevant, not just in Frankfurt, but also in Berlin and Heidelberg. This builds a bridge also, which result, because the Frankfurt fair is also a festival for literature.”

And Boos then mentioned efforts at Frankfurt to support “young publishers from all over the world, connecting and networking—they create the future of the market.”

Younger Publishers, Authors

Putting a new emphasis on young publishers, the program on Tuesday morning included an articulate conversation with Vanina Colagiovanni, the publishing director of Gog & Magog in Buenos Aires, and Mehar Anaokar, an editor with Profiles’ Serpent’s Tail Classics in London.

Speaking with Frankfurt communications lead Ines Bachor, these two professionals talked about the value they’ve found in the newly developed Frankfurt Global Network program, formed by a merger of the former Frankfurt Fellows and Invitation Program.

Colagiovanni and Anaokar told Bachor that the experience of their fellowship/grant opportunities with Frankfurt have not only inspired them to seek out more such programs but to find new ways, themselves, to network with fellow younger professionals in the field .

And the Berlin-based S. Fischer Verlage author Nora Haddada spoke in a crisp, no-nonsense alto about the capability she sees as a young adult in authors’ capability to address social and political challenges. Pointing out that “shit is going down,” starting a few years ago in many social and governmental contexts and that there’s little benefit to writers in remaining quiet at such times.

“Fear is the little brother of cowardice, and only a few things protect you as badly against authoritarianism as cowardice,” she told the press gathering, indicating that the best recourse for authors today is to speak up, press their work forward, and avoid shrinking from such adversity.

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More from Publishing Perspectives on Frankfurter Buchmesse is here; more on international book fairs and publishing-industry trade shows is here; more on world book publishing and politics is here; and more on the German book publishing industry and book business is here.

Our Publishing Perspectives 2025 Show Magazine is being released today, October 15 and can be found in all the halls of Frankfurter Buchmesse around the Agora.

If you can’t be with us in Frankfurt this year, be sure to download our PDF of the full magazine here. 

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